Just stepping into the world of service modelling and thought that building up a model of a test monitoring environment I have here might be a good place to start. Im not necessarily intending to flow events into all parts of the model (bit hard since its the portal which provides the events), just more thought it would be complex enough to give me some issues modelling it. Which unfortunately is the case

In the environment we have the Portal, running Performance Manager 2.3 Impact 7.0.01 CMDB 2.0.1.3 on AR7, backended by SQL2k5.

The Portal itself is pretty easy, it follows the standard DB/App style model.

However, where I am struggling is with things like bringing the SIM and BEM cells into play and where to put them in the model and how to deal with things like event flows. EG:

The cells depend on IIWS to flow events from the Portal to the cells, but IIWS being down doesnt directly stop the cells working, it just means that events have stopped flowing.

Or, as another example. Impact Explorer depends on the cells being available to be able to connect to them, but just because a cell is down doesnt mean that Impact Explorer is unavailable. Of if the BEM cell is down, that doesnt mean that the SIM cell is unavailable, just that events arent flowing into SIM. But if the SIM cell is down, then the Impact Portal is down.

And Im not sure with how to deal with things like that. The other place Im struggling a bit is where to use things like 'app service' v's 'application' v's 'application system' etc. And not sure where to find definitions of all these and examples of where to use them.

Has anyone got any tips? Am I trying to go too granular? Has anyone done anything similar as an exercise, or for a POC, or production? Would anyone have a screenshot of their sandbox which they might be able to post?

Ive read the Admin manual, and also the white paper from this site, which helps. But doesnt quite give me enough of a picture.

Modeling how the infrastructure monitoring tools are working is a little different than normal components. If iiWS is down and no events are going though, it does not mean that anything is harmed other than iiWS. iiWS could simply have been processing OK messages. It also does not hurt the cell. The cell is still processing along.

The way I have seen it done is to have a higher level logical component such as SAP monitoring and have sub components of all the programs used to monitor SAP. Then when one of these has a problem the logical component will show their is a problem.

You can also have logic groups of all the cells, all the adapters, and others like that.

Apparently you know when/how SIM, cells, etc environment, is impacted and in which degree, so I think what you need to do are: streamline the logics of the situations, locate the impact driving events (you may need to refine the events or even create some mechansims to generate them), and associate the driving events with the components (SIM, cells, adapters, etc). This way, when the identified events show up, the components in your model will be reflecting.

Thanks for the thoughts. I guess at the end of the day, one thing does 'impact' the other, so it could be set to flow an 'impacted' state via a 'decreasing status' up through the model. Or possibly could try and get some logical containers in there representing event flows (as a business process icon??), which could chain into a 'Event Management Flow' 'service' or something like that??

The fact you are asking these question and the way you explain them suggests to me you already have a pretty good idea , its a huge subject this and there are very few sources of usefulproduct specific documentation out there, I have attached one which is an excellent source of reference and I am sure you will find it useful....